Ancient Technology

Back in 2005, a Korean company introduced a tiny cube-shaped MP3 player that had more features than the then-dominant iPod Shuffle. The adorable MobiBLU included a voice recorder and an FM tuner, and was a Walmart exclusive item in the United States that came with free Walmart music store downloads. While those songs self-destructed back in 2008, the devices haven’t gone anywhere. You can find them on Walmart’s shelves, often at full price. [More]

In your office, there might be an ancient, dusty computer lurking in a corner that no one remembers to take to the electronics recycling place. Maybe it runs some scary-old operating system like Windows 95, and you wouldn’t use it for a mission-critical function. Would you? At Orly airport outside of Paris, France, the breakdown of a program that provides weather and visibility updates to pilots grounded dozens of planes. The problem: that program only runs on Windows 3.1. [More]

The Raiders of the Lost Walmart are a fearless band of retail archaeologists who will stop at nothing to find uncover every retail antiquity that the world’s big-box stores have to offer. Whether it’s a rebate due in 2004 or a Game Boy Advance of ambiguous color, the Raiders have shared their findings with Consumerist so we can all…well, mostly we’ve just learned not to shop for electronics on clearance at discount stores. [More]

Does the thought of missing your favorite show make you want to sit firmly planted in front of the television all day every day? What if you didn’t have the option of using a DVR or (gasp!) tape recorder? You almost didn’t, except for an important ruling made 30 years ago. [More]

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